Esganikan tilted her head side to side but she seemed perfectly calm. Aitassi and Ralassi were not. They were seething, teeth bared, and Ralassi had taken over the communications position in front of the bulkhead. Ual found it hard to see how it was operated. There were no controls that he could identify, just an illuminated panel the size of a plate that moved when Ralassi did.
“You fired upon ussissi,” he said. “This has never happened before and it will not be tolerated. We will no longer fly your vessels. You will cease firing now.”
There was absolute silence from the Jejeno ground station. Ralassi was right: nobody had ever fired on a vessel knowing ussissi were on board. The isenj were reliant on them as nonmilitary pilots and interpreters between isenj regions. But then no alien vessel had ever breached Umeh’s airspace uninvited. The old protocols and assumptions had crumbled in a matter of minutes.
Jejeno looked as it always had. Its intricate towers and forests of bronze and brown buildings glittered in the afternoon light, and another vapor trail rose from the ground. This time there was no gentle shiver as the missile was deflected by the Eqbas vessel. It never reached them.
“God, it looks just like tracer fire,” said Eddie, wandering up and down the bridge behind his bee cam. Ual watched and felt his courage begin to abandon him.
Then Eqbas Vorhi ran out of patience.
Bursts of yellow light stabbed a neat and precise path down to the vapor trail and the bulkhead dimmed the light from the explosion. Then a bright green beam picked out a target in the city below and a streak of reflected light flashed down it. Fire spread out from the point of impact and black smoke roiled up above the tops of the buildings.
Esganikan considered the image on the bulkhead. The view changed to a closer shot and Ual could see a crater fringed by twisted frames and shattered blocks of buildings.
“The point from which you launch your air defenses has been destroyed,” she said calmly, as if she had done this many times before. “I see no point in causing more destruction than is necessary and we will not fire again unless there is another attack. Talk to your colleagues and explain that I would like to speak to the Northern Assembly today.” She turned and took a few slow paces down the length of the bridge, her plume of red fur bobbing as she walked, and reached out to touch the bulkhead image of the only open space in Jejeno—its port landing fields. “I will wait. Now, helm, take us down.”
“Shit,” said Eddie.
Ual wondered if Esganikan had any comprehension of what followed when an explosion occurred in a densely populated city. If she did, then she showed no sign of anxiety about it. But he knew. He could imagine what was happening now and he was terrified.
Beneath them, water conduits would be flooding the streets. Homes, food production centers and offices ran right up to the walls of the defense station building, and they would have collapsed. Fires would be spreading. There would be no water to extinguish them because the pressure in the water supply would have plummeted. And there would be panic and crushing, fleeing crowds and many, many civilian deaths.
Eddie seemed to see his thoughts. “We’d call that fish in a barrel,” he said. “Nowhere to run.”
“That describes the situation for us all,” said Ual.
They were attempting to bury Jonathan Burgh when Lindsay and Rayat arrived on Mar’an’cas.
Lindsay’s trousers were soaked up to the knee. Barencoin and Becken had been in a hurry to deliver their prisoners to the colonists and she’d stepped from the boat into deeper water than she anticipated.
Rayat watched the burial party of colonists trying to dig in the thin soil. “No carrion-eating life on the island, I take it?”
Barencoin shrugged, chivvying him along like a sheepdog. “We’re all carrion-eaters to the wess’har.”
“Shall we give them a hand?” Lindsay asked. “I think they’re going to have to pile rocks.”
“You do what you like,” said Barencoin. “We’re persona non shit-pot with the colony.”
He turned back down the path, Becken close behind him. James Garrod came down from the camp and grunted for Lindsay and Rayat to follow him.
“We haven’t got much here,” said James. Lindsay walked through the camp of oddly decorative tents, wary of a hostile response. People seemed subdued but purposeful. “And even if we’re going home to Earth, we’ve still got a few years to wait out. So you pull your weight for the time you’re here.”
Rayat had somehow managed to grab a small bag of personal effects before he was dragged out of Umeh Station. He hitched it higher on his shoulder and Lindsay wondered if she could talk him into letting her borrow a fresh shirt. “No problem,” he said to James. He seemed in his personablemode, probably grooming the colonists for some act of sympathy that would benefit him. “We’ll do whatever you need.”
James showed them to a tent. It seemed they’d have to share. Lindsay’s distaste must have shown on her face.
“We don’t do private suites,” he said. “Will you be coming to services?”
It took her a few moments to work out that he meant worship. “I’m not sure I believe in God,” she said. Rayat was carefully silent.
“Well, he’s there, and you might as well start getting to know him before you go to him,” said James. The kid said it with such casual certainty that her stomach tightened involuntarily. “You’ll have a lot to talk to him about.”
James walked away. Rayat tried the thin mattress on the floor and sat down cross-legged, hands folded in his lap. Lindsay wished for a change of clothing and an end to the new doubt that was starting to overtake her.
“Since I left Earth, I’ve taken more beatings than I did even in training,” said Rayat. “My job’s not usually this violent.”
Is death really going to be the end of it? Am I ever going to have peaceful oblivion? “I noticed you don’t fight back. Ever.”
“No point fighting unless you’re trying to escape or survive,” he said. “Save it for when you really need it.”
“And you don’t really need it now?”
“I’ve never been this close to death before.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She wasn’t sure if she believed him. He appeared completely drained of motivation and color. So even a spook had his limits: it seemed that exhaustion and inevitability had finally ground him down as well.
“You’re resigned to what’s coming, then?”
Rayat made a distracted click with his teeth. “I know what you think of me, but I find it as hard as you do to come to terms with what we did.”
“There’s no we in this, you bastard. You loaded the cobalt primers in the ERDs, not me.”
For once Rayat didn’t argue. “I know.”
“And all for nothing. Ade Bennett’s infected and Shan’s walking around large as life.”
“Bennett?”
“I never told you in case you got stupid ideas again.”
“Bennett?” The odd amalgam of revelation and dismay on his face was priceless. “Shit. Shit.”
“So we destroyed a sentient species for nothing.”
“You think I feel good about that?” She could have sworn he was genuinely anguished. “Okay, I’ve done things in my career that most people would find nauseating. But my priority is the welfare of my country, and I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to ensure that.”
“Well, at least you admit it.”
“Oh, I’ll do more than admit it. I’d do it again.”
“Why does that not surprise me?”
“Look, girlie, we don’t live in a cost-free universe. We get our hands dirty just by living day to day.” Girlie. That was Shan’s dismissive term for her, too. Rayat had come as close to sincerity as Lindsay had ever seen, and it was disturbing: he was suddenly angry. “So, what if some states on Earth got hold of c’naatat, and we didn’t? You think that’s not worth paying a high price to avoid? If not for Europe, then for Earth? You must have
thought it was, at least enough to use nukes.”
“Some prices are just too high.”
“And how many nice people get killed because they happen to be in the bad guy’s army? There are always prices to pay and there’s always an innocent bystander, but you can’t let that stop you. You know something? I’d kill Frankland without a second thought, but at least she understands the stakes and she’s got the balls to live with what she does. I’m not even sure we’re after different things, either.”
“For all her faults, she wouldn’t have risked a species.”
“Unless they’re humans.”
Lindsay hated him, and his logic, and his contempt, all of which reminded her more of Shan than she could tolerate. Both had the same total, ruthless focus. They did dirty jobs: they risked their lives anonymously for their obsessive principles. And yet she couldn’t see them as the same species as herself.
She shifted tack, worrying what her own motives truly were. “You going to go to have a talk with God, then? See what deal you can sort out with him?”
“I’m not a Christian.”
“Neither am I. Well, not practicing.”
“How do you cope?”
“I don’t. I wish there was something I could do to make amends but it’s a tall order, putting genocide right again.”
Rayat tipped the contents of his bag out on the bed. His worldly goods consisted of two gray shirts, some unidentifiable balled-up fabric and a wallet. He sighed quietly. “What would we all give to turn back time, eh?”
“Pretty well everything,” said Lindsay. “Everything.”
19
Withdraw your vessel from our planet or face the consequences.
Priority message from Minister PAR NIR BEDOI Northern Assembly, to Nevyan Tan Mestin
It was cold and the bezeri who nestled in the rocks off the coastline of St. Chad’s island didn’t know Aras at all.
They knew what he was, though.
He held the lamp and signaled to them, speaking wess’u for the lamp to shape into a language of color. You asked for me.
The rocks sparkled with concentric circles of pulsing yellow light that radiated from four or five central points. The bezeri slowly peeled away from the hiding place, hanging in the water a little way from him with their tentacles trailing in the current. Aras put his other hand out to steady himself.
One of them spoke. The lights on her mantle—the same lights that lived in Shan’s hands—flared into complex patterns of red, green and blue that the lamp converted to sound.
So it’s true. You are the creature that can live both here and in the Dry Above with equal ease, the one that never dies. One of those who saved us from the polluters.
I am, saidAras. But I made mistakes and your people died.
Who did this to us?
He would tell them the exact truth. The generic gethes would mean nothing to them. Like wess’har, they were specific. Humans who came here. We have already killed two as an act of balance.
Are there others who are guilty?
Yes. What justice do you require for this?
We want them balanced too. And we will do this ourselves. We want all of those who brought this destruction upon us.
Bezeri didn’t have that clear wess’har definition of responsibility any more than humans did. Aras knew they would include Qureshi and Barencoin and Chahal in that category—and Ade.
This was one occasion when the truth would serve no purpose. For the first time in his life, Aras lied like a gethes. He didn’t lie by omission, as he had done with difficulty before. He lied, completely and totally.
There are only two of them. A female called Lindsay Neville and a male called Mohan Rayat.
Bring them to us.
I will.
There is one more thing. The bezeri took on her colors of quiet consideration, light blue rhythmic pulses. It was a while before she spoke. There are too few of us. We need to rebuild, to recover what is left of our culture and our history. We said we did not want the help of aliens, but times are hard.
Bezeri had a powerful sense of place. Being rooted in the coastal waters of these islands made them vulnerable, as did their fragile biochemistry. They cared about their clans and their territories and they kept detailed records. Faced with destruction, they needed to find comfort in their past exactly as humans did. It was ironic.
I will get you that help, said Aras, thinking of the Eqbas scientists.
We mean you. We want you to return to us. You can live among us.
Aras wondered if he had misunderstood. Among you?
The lights rippled, both fascinating and desperate. You cannot drown. You can survive anywhere.
Aras’s wess’har candor almost betrayed him, but he bit back a refusal. His mind was filled with selfish preoccupations: he had an isan and a brother now. There was a time when he might have conquered his dislike of immersion and sought escape with the bezeri, but that time was long gone, and he was ashamed that his first instinct was to abandon them again.
That will be difficult, said Aras.
You said you would be there for us. You promised.
And so he had. Give me time to think.
A male bezeri at the back of the group came forward and reached into his mantle with one tentacle. He drew out a small flat oval and extended it towards Aras.
It was the ancient azin shell map that Aras had once owned. The shell was as transparent as glass and the bezeri had once made these beautiful complex maps by compressing colored patterns of sand between the layers of shell. Aras had given it to Shan, and she had returned it to the bezeri with one addition: a thin line of red sand, sprinkled carefully like a border, her way of telling them that she planned to protect them from outsiders. She called it her exclusion zone.
But it hadn’t quite worked out. He took the map from the outstretched tentacle.
Why are you returning this? Aras asked.
Give it to the female who gave it back to us. Tell her that her red line did not hold.
But she tried very hard.
It was not enough.
Aras grasped the tether that reached down from the niluyghur and twisted it, the map tucked tightly to his chest. The line drew him slowly up through the water and he watched the lights dwindle beneath him. One of the Eqbas crew caught him by his tunic and hauled him inboard, watching fascinated as he coughed up the seawater from his lungs and shook himself dry.
He cradled the azin map in both hands all the way back to the ship, remembering all the times he had sat alone in his own vessel on Constantine and studied its contour lines.
Tell her that her red line did not hold.
Shan knew that already. And she hadn’t failed them: he had, right from the time he had allowed the Constantine mission to survive.
Now the bezeri were asking for his help again. Aras thought of the concepts of sin and forgiveness and mercy that Ben Garrod had taught him about nearly two hundred years ago, and he remembered another one: atonement.
The Pajat coast, Wessej.
“I need some normal human DNA,” said Shapakti.
“Don’t look at me,” said Shan. “Have you tried Eddie? Journalists share ninety-nine percent of DNA with humans.”
“That is humor.”
“You’re catching on.” The glass raft neared Mar’an’cas, skimming over a relatively calm sea. Clouds threatened to empty themselves any minute, and Shan wasn’t sure if the raft was watertight from the top. Ade sat cross-legged aft of them, if the raft’s layout could be described in nautical terms. “I expect you can get plenty from the colonists. You’re almost in their good books for helping them fulfill their religious duty.”
“Are they normal humans?”
“Apart from the fact they’re as mad as a box of frogs,” Ade muttered. “That’s normal too.”
Shan walked around the transparent deck, never having learned the sailor’s discipline of not compromising the trim of the craft. Ade, frowning slightly,
looked as if he disapproved.
“They’re normal in the sense that most humans who could afford health care were genetically manipulated in some way, and that was the stock they came from,” she said. “But I come from a Pagan family. They wouldn’t have any truck with genetic interference, so my DNA was pretty well wild Homo sapiens.”
“And this is what F’nar used to engineer the antihuman pathogen.”
“Yes. They had a sample of my hair from the time before I caught c’naatat.”
“As wide a range of specimens as possible would suit my purposes.”
Shapakti had no hidden agendas; wess’har never did, as literal and unthinkingly frank as small children.
“And what are your purposes, then?”
“I would like to see if it is possible to stop humans becoming host to c’naatat.”
That sounded sensible enough. But Shan’s old ingrained misgivings about biological research began to nag at her. It was a little late for that, given that her DNA was currently doing a decent razor-wire job in quarantining Bezer’ej. It had certainly worked bloody well on the family in the church. She was aware of Ade staring at her.
“I don’t like experiments,” she said.
Shapakti appeared to understand her a lot better than she thought he did. “I only need to record a profile of cells. Then I can use models to explore the possibilities.”
“And you developed that expertise on yourselves, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Just checking.”
“I can see why you doubt us. Life on your planet developed through competition. Ours developed largely through cooperation, symbiosis and sustainable equilibrium. Would you like to visit Eqbas Vorhi?”
She wondered what the payload from Thetis would have made of that. “Yes, I would. One day.”
The raft beached and they stepped ashore. Ade kept glancing back at the vessel as if he didn’t quite believe it. As they walked into Constantine camp with its bizarre jacquard tents and pervading smell of human waste, the marine slipped his rifle off its webbing and cradled it across his chest, looking worryingly prepared. Shan thought she’d be jumpy if she’d been stoned. She had faced a hail of missiles far too many times in her police career to take a restrained and sympathetic view of public disorder, and reached down her spine to the back of her belt to feel the comforting smooth grip of her 9mm. Shapakti stared.